Those of you who have been following my blog over the past six months know that I am now 71 years old, that I avoided mandatory retirement six years ago but was reduced to teaching two courses per term. I have stayed teaching only two courses although my salary was also cut in half. I have decided to retire at the end of the 2011 Spring Term, which began on January 3rd.
You will notice on my blog I have placed an advertisement for a Retirement Workshop that I have created and intend to present following my retirement. I have already begun contacting organizations that might be interested in sponsoring the workshop for their employees.
Ok, so what’s new? Recently I was surfing the Internet when I came upon an article on Post-retirement employment.[i] It is a brief study of findings extracted from the Canadian General Social Survey. The study reports that 22% of retirees returned to work after they had ceased working. The report is well written and may help you to see things more clearly about your own retirement. You can read it yourself by using the endnote on this blog posting.
In the survey, similar to my own experience, some people reported reduced work hours prior to full retirement. This decision is connected with good health, level of education and skills needed to compete with other potential employees. I think my current situation meets these criteria.
The study also indicates the post-retirement employment is more common among individuals with professional occupations. Persons with management experience and technicians are next most likely to follow this path. Gender factors indicated different probabilities of returning to paid employment. Men were almost twice a likely as women to find new work following retirement.
Twenty five percent of persons who retired between 50 and 59 returned to work. Of those returning to work “…financial considerations was mentioned most frequently but it was cited by considerably less than half by returnees (38%).”
Interestingly about a quarter of the respondents said they just didn’t like retirement. Of these the majority reported the need for the challenges that employment provides, their connections with other workers and having a sense of purpose. As indicated above that doesn’t mean, however, that they went back to work fulltime. They most often chose to work a fewer number of hours. Within that group most people chose to work less than 30 hours/week. The number of hours worked by those with higher levels of education was the more diverse
One more thing, it has been concluded that people currently approaching retirement are in better health than their predecessors. There will be.. “Lower mortality rates overall, and for cardiovascular disease in particular, as well as lower odds of heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and activity limitation…”
So if you are reading this from a different country than Canada, perhaps your statistics will be somewhat different. The important thing to remember is that we are all human beings and we can learn from each other. Happy New Y [i] Schellenberg, Turotte, and Ram Sept 2005 Perspectives Stats Canada- General Social Survey Catalogue no. 75-001-XIE
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